We ♥ web applications!

Mobalean is lead by Henri Servomaa, the original founder and mobile developer.
At Mobalean we strive to develop services which are loved by our clients and users.
By working in an agile manner, quickly adapting to changing requirements,
we can deliver quickly and often.

Henri Servomaa

Hailing from Finland, Henri has a long history with computers and the internet.
With a background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he has worked
in Japan as Software Developer and System Admin since 2001. In 2005, he joined a
company to develop mobile sites for the Japanese market and has been involved in mobile ever since.

Contractors

Cleve Lendon is a Canadian engineer who has been contracting for Mobalean. He came to Tokyo in 1994, and has lived here ever since.
He has broad experience as a software developer, which includes development of mainframe software,
Internet applications and mobile apps (Android and iOS).
He is especially skilled at writing Java applications (vd. Simredo 4, Grafikilo 15).
When not programming, Cleve enjoys improv acting and studying languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.

Mobalean Alumni

Paul McMahon and Michael Reinsch were co-founders of Mobalean. They have moved to Doorkeeper KK, a company they established in 2013. Both are now actively developing the doorkeeper platform.

Web Development

Our strength is crafting web services for both Japanese and international markets.
We bring our technical and cultural experience to help you adapt your ideas into successful products.

We develop with Ruby on Rails and use the best agile practices and tools,
such as test driven development and continuous integration to achieve quality.

Japanese Mobile Consulting

We are the leading provider of technical expertise about the Japanese mobile web. Mobalean started when the smartphones were just appearing on the market.
Our Keitai Web Technology Guide
is a quick starting point for learning about the initial challenges of Japanese mobile development. Although the technology stacks have changed since the proliferation of iOS and Android, some of the idiosyncrasies remain. Most notably, the Japanese market is still very much dominated by the big three carriers: DoCoMo, au and Softbank.
Developers can find more technical details in our Keitai-Dev Wiki.

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Using the Asset Pipeline under Rails 3.1

請求書.jp allows Japanese freelancers and small businesses to easily create invoices. We’ve built it using Rails 3.0 in conjunction with Coffee Script and Sass, and host the application on Heroku. Although CoffeeScript and Sass have made developing the service easier, getting them setup on Heroku is a bit of a hassle. However, Rails 3.1 introduces the asset pipeline, which not only makes it easier to use CoffeeScript and Sass, but also handles the packaging of these resources into a single file for increased performance.

Although Rails 3.1 has not been officially released yet, it is out of beta and into the fourth release candidate. Given how attractive the asset pipeline was, I decided to give upgrading 請求書.jp a shot.

The biggest challenge was to find information about how the asset pipeline works. I was able to come across a couplearticles and a presentation DHH gave, but overall the information was sparse on how it actually worked. The best success I had in understanding how everything worked was to generate a new rails project with 3.1 and then use the scaffold command to generate a simple resource. By studying the generated code, I was able to figure out how to convert our application. The following is a summary of the asset pipeline specific changes I made.

After resolving these issues, we deployed it to Heroku. There we discovered one issue - that the New Relic plugin isn’t compatible with Rails 3.1. Once removing the plugin, we had no other issues.

Upgrading 請求書.jp to Rails 3.1 took me a total of eleven hours. In its current state, Rails 3.1 is usable, but upgrading requires a fair amount of independent research and debugging. Once it is actually released, these hiccups should go away, and upgrading your application should go smoothly.